The government doesn’t want us to be lonely. Just single.

It has been two years since Steve Hilton, the strategic ‘mind’ behind Dave Cameron, founded a ‘behavioural insights team’ at Number 10. The team includes a ‘behavioural nudge’ unit, whose mission is to nudge people towards the kind of life Dave thinks is good for them. What people themselves think is naturally immaterial.

Now my assumption, one that has yet to be proved wrong, is that, when the government has to attach unsightly names to its projects, the projects have to pursue unsightly aims. If an official is called a facilitator of optimisation or an optimiser of facilitation, you know he’s up to no good. When an office is called a diversity unit or social adhesion group, you know it’s a quango for mindless, immoral bureaucrats.

Witness the latest ‘insight’ by David Halpern, director of the ‘behavioural nudge’ unit. But before I tell you what it is, what’s the greatest problem the government has with old people? Right. There are too many of them, too many wrinklies soaking up their pensions, depriving the state of the funds badly needed for foreign aid and to pay all those facilitators of optimisation. With people living longer, the giant pyramid scheme called National Insurance simply can’t cope: too many able-bodied young people are encouraged to sponge off the government to have much left for the elderly.

And the solution? For people to retire later and die earlier. This puts the ‘insight’ into its proper context, and do remember that Dave Halpern works for Dave Cameron. According to Dave H, retirement is worse for old people than smoking: it makes them lonely, and they die sooner. It’s much better for them to work till they are carried out, feet first. ‘Work matters, particularly for older people, not just for money but absolutely for social contact,’ was how Dave H expressed his ‘insight’, with the elegance we’ve learned to expect from government stooges.

I’m deeply moved by this show of concern for our well-being. My eyes are misting over, but I’m still able to make out the outlines of a canard. First the state taxes our income mercilessly, making it hard for us to provide for our own retirement. Then it yanks out another 12 percent in National Insurance ‘contributions’ — an amount that would make an average Brit a wealthy, BUPA-treated retiree if he could invest it into a private pension and insurance. And then the state tells us that we haven’t spent enough years ‘contributing’, so could we please spend more. It’s for our own good.

Call me a cynic, but I have a sneaky suspicion that in this instance the context determines the text. The state, due to its own criminal, self-serving wastefulness, is — to use a technical term — skint. It’ll try anything in this desperate situation, in this case under the guise of touching concern for our ‘social interaction.’

I’d like to offer my own insight to the two Daves: you don’t have to have a 9-to-5 job not to be lonely. Neither my wife nor I go to an office, and yet we never suffer from solitude. We have our friends, our colleagues (mostly writers for me, mostly musicians for her), our families, our church. And, above all, we have each other.

In fact, marriage is the best way of preventing loneliness, and you don’t even have to buy a dog. Hence if the state struck a blow for marriage, it would strike one against loneliness. So how can the state do that?

By activating the only effective mechanism at its disposal: taxation. Or rather by using what I call negative taxation for positive purposes. It should gear the system of taxation towards rewarding marriage at the expense of bachelorhood or unmarried cohabitation. The idea is hardly ground-breaking: just about every Western country has marriage tax allowances, designed to promote the most crucial social institution in any society — and, as a corollary, to help people not to feel lonely in their old age.

And this is precisely the measure that our government has refused to introduce in its next budget. Advice to Dave C and his hangers-on: spare us your nauseating, touchy-feely bleating. We’ll sort ourselves out, thank you very much. Just don’t enslave us with extortionist taxation, nor fritter away our money on all those ‘behavioural nudging’ units.

Another insight of my own I can offer is that a government that pretends to do a lot for you will inevitably do a lot to you. To that there are no known exceptions. If this insight could help you ‘nudge’ this lot out of government, that would be no bad thing aesthetically. In practical terms, however, one struggles to come up with any alternative within our political class. They are all the same.

By Alexander Boot